Chocolate fondant - delicious dessert

Made this fantastic dessert on Sunday - prepared it Saturday and baked it when dear friends were at my place for Sunday lunch. Very easy to make, but really impresses those who try it.
The trick is to serve it warm and not to cook it too long, it is supposed to be a little runny in the middle.

 It should work to double the recipe. Notice! This one I didn't make up myself, I will add the reference, this is a modified recipe from a Swedish cookbook - but there are many variants of chocolade fondants - fondant means that it is creamy.

This can be made lactose free, very easily.

 Chocolate Fondant



For 4 people (four fondants)
Oven temperature 180 degrees C (360 F)
Can be prepared the day before, stored in the fridge, and then just baked just before serving.

Ingredients

100 g butter
100 g dark chocolate, 70%
2 eggs,
2 egg yolks
3/4 decilitre sugar
1/4 decilitre flour (approx, if the flower is very try you will need less)



How to

• Take the butter out of the fridge and let it get to room temperature. If you are lactose intolerant, use lactose free butter - that's what I did.

• Break the chocolate in pieces, and put the chocolate and butter in a bowl. You want to melt it, do it either in a microwave (no idea on effect etc., I am so old fashion that I don't even have a microwave, I think the stove is great and fast enough) or on the stove. If you are going to use the stove, don't do it directly in a pot, but take a bowl that you put over a pot of boiling water, the heat will melt the chocolate but make sure it doesn't burn. Be careful though, you don't want water to get into the chocolate cream. And don't stress it, there is no need, while this is melting you can prepare the rest.

• Poor eggs, egg yolks (easy enough to separate when you crack the egg, and besides, from the whites you can make meringues later) and sugar into a mixing bowl. Beat the sugar and eggs, including yolks- you want it to get really fluffy.

• CAREFULLY stir the chocolate and butter into the sugar/eggs mix, do it little by little. And stir, using a spoon etc, no beating/whipping!

• Stir the flour into the mix (but stir as little as possible, here it is even more important)

• Poor into little oven-proof vessels/dishes of some kind, like the one I have here, see picture. The fondant is supposed to go into individual dishes, one per person. I prepared my little dishes with butter and powder sugar (instead of flour which you would use for "normal" cakes) so that the fondants wouldn't stick, in case I wanted to take them out of the vessel before serving (although in the end I decided to serve it as you see on the picture) - remember to fill only 3/4 of the dish, or you will have it all over the oven... It will grow...

Now! If you want to prepare in advance, this is how far you can prepare the day before, if you are not going to bake it today, put the dishes in the fridge and wait until the end of the main course with the baking - they will bake nicely while you clear the table, as long as you remembered to switch on the oven.

Baking

• Switch the oven on, 180 degrees C (360 F, if I am not mistaken, but you may want to check a translation table). 

•  When the oven is warm, put the fondants in, you want to place them pretty high up in the oven, although not in the very top.

• Let the fondants bake for 10-15 minutes. Take them out when they have grown a bit and the surface is looking like a baked cake - dry, no longer shiny - you will know what I mean when you see it. The good thing is that it is supposed to be runny in the middle, so you can't take them out too early, really, you will see when the surface is good. 

•  Serve immediately! Enjoy!

Serve with for example raspberries - marries well with the dark chocolate.

A little bit of whipped cream may also work, or, as I did when my friends were over (the one on the picture here was a left over fondant that I baked in the evening for myself) a little bit of thick plain Turkish yoghurt. Yummy and very very fresh. This is a delicacy, it is not supposed to be huge and make you overfull.
If you want to make it lactose free you will need to use lactose free cream or soy cream, obviously. Yoghurt contains very little lactose though, so it if just has to be very little lactose, you should be fine anyhow - ask the lactose intolerant what would work.

Tip! When doing the eggs; If you are not used to separating egg yolks from the whites, do them one by one over a separate cup - I always do, because if I would happen to crack the yolk and mix the two, at least I kept the other white(s) clean, if you want to make meringues you can't have ANY yolk in the whites. I would also, to avoid waste, start with separating the yolks because if you are not successful  for the first two tries you can use the full egg and then give it another try with the next egg - there are anyhow supposed to be two full eggs in the fondant. But that is my view, perhaps you have so much you can do with eggs that it doesn't matter if you break to many, and then you can just ignore the advice and make more cakes etc ;-)